[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] GPL defense issues

Luis R. Rodriguez mcgrof at kernel.org
Tue Aug 30 18:04:44 UTC 2016


On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 10:38 AM, Mark Brown <broonie at kernel.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 08:26:38AM +0200, Greg KH wrote:
>> On Sun, Aug 28, 2016 at 02:06:44PM -0000, David Woodhouse wrote:
>
>> > Even though I abhor what Patrick McHardy is doing, I still can't quite
>> > find it in my heart to have *sympathy* for his victims. Because it's not
>> > as if he's just taking random pot-shots at passers-by on the street. These
>> > people defended their actions in court, and lost.
>
>> No, that's not what Patrick did.  Whenever he actually took something to
>> court, _he_ lost.  Companies paid him off before then because they were
>> scared for foolish reasons, or it was honestly just cheaper to do it
>> than go to court and win.  He took the traditional model of patent troll
>> to the next level.
>
> Please bear in mind that public information on what's going on there is
> very scarce, I suspect most people have only seen the SFLC statement at:

SFLC != SFC. It will be hard, but try and look at why we have two orgs
now. SFLC did do good -- it helped with the upstream openhal efforts
and ath5k review. But the org that put out the review below and then
published the Principles is SFC, not SFLC.

>    https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/jul/19/patrick-mchardy-gpl-enforcement/
>
> (it seems from followups that there may be some confusion even in what
> I've quoted above).

Agreed, I think more has been revealed in this thread then in that
article, sadly most is information learned so far is through the grape
vine.

 Luis


More information about the Ksummit-discuss mailing list